Soil Conservation Surveys Guidebook

Describes procedures for measuring disturbance to soil caused by forest practices.

Provides direction on how to prepare operational plans and prescriptions that require specification of limits for various types of soil disturbance during forestry operations.

This handbook sets forth a procedure for making a soil conservation survey and includes instructions for mapping the major physical land features essential to the development of a coordinated soil conservation program and for interpreting those features in terms of land use capability. The procedure given is designed to be broad in scope. Variations and supplements to fit local conditions are to be established by the field inspector at the time a survey is initiated.

A silviculture prescription is a site-specific plan that describes the forest management objectives for an area. A prescription prescribes the method for harvesting the existing forest stand and a series of silviculture treatments that will be carried out to establish a free growing crop of trees in a manner that accommodates other resource values as identified. This document describes the contents of what silviculture prescription plans must contain in British Columbia to comply with the Forest Practices Code. It includes information on general requirements for the plan as well as specific requirements for tenure identification, management objectives, degree of consistency with other plans, ecological and resource information, forest health assessment and prescription, soil conservation, actions to accommodate forest resource values, silvicultural systems, harvesting, fire hazard abatement, silviculture treatments, stocking standards, and mapping.

A stand management prescription is a document for describing actions to be carried out on a free-growing site to see that stand management activities are planned and implemented to maintain or enhance site productivity, to ensure that resource values are identified and taken into account, and to set out a series of stand management activities to produce a stand that meets the management objectives. This guide provides a logical sequence of steps on how to prepare and administer a stand management prescription in accordance with the Forest Practices Code of British Columbia. These steps include identification and collection of background information, setting of stand-level resource objectives, conducting fieldwork, preparation of the final prescription, production of the stand management prescription map, and administration.